Welcome to the Abbey

‘No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crises of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order.’
- Eric Voegelin

What I do here

I launched this Substack in early 2021, to publish a series of essays analysing what I call ‘the Machine’: to get the heart of it, and to understand how to live with it. I finished this work in mid-2023, and it turned into a book which was published in 2025.

Over those two years, I wrote myself into an explicitly spiritual understanding of our place and time. I came to see that our culture’s problems - problems I had been obsessively digging into for decades - were not economic, political or technological, and neither were they to be ‘solved’ by intellectuals or scientists or activists. I came to believe that our society is spiritually wounded, and barely even knows it. A spiritual wound requires a spiritual poultice. Medicine, now, is what I write about here.

Five years ago, much to my own surprise, I became an Orthodox Christian. You can read that story here. As anyone who has been on this journey knows, it has a tendency to take you over, as it should. After all, either God is real or he isn’t. If he isn’t, then you’re wasting your time even thinking about him. If he is, then understanding him - and being changed by him - should be the work of your life. If he is, then any culture that is to survive has to be cored around this great mystery.

Here, you will find writing about the spiritual chaos of the times and the healing waters, from an Orthodox Christian perspective. I follow my intuitions about what the new faith of the Machine age is going to be, and I write about a wild Christian response. What does that mean? I have tried to explain it here.

I don’t only write for Christians. My readership contains many Christians of differing backgrounds, but it also contains Buddhists, Sufis, pagans, atheists, Jews and doubtless plenty of people without spiritual labels. If this writing speaks to you, you are welcome to follow along and see where it goes. We’ll head off into the desert, and see what watering holes we encounter. Or perhaps we’ll enter the forest in search of dragons.

Why an Abbey?

'Ideas create idols. Only wonder leads to knowing.'

- St Gregory of Nyssa

Abbeys of Misrule arose in late medieval France, set up by irreverent locals to mock the powers of the day. They were places of chaos, in which the world was turned upside down. Black was white and wrong was right. Perhaps this sounds familiar.

Misrule is the norm in the West today. The ground is shifting everywhere. A new religion is rising - the religion of the Machine. It may be that all the old structures - cultural structures, Christian structures, all the familiar things - need to fall away in order that we can see beyond them to what is really going on. These days, I think we need a few Abbeys in which we can re-establish some semblance of sanity: in which we can look to real truths, and think about how to re-seed them in a strange new world.

Should you subscribe?

‘All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.’
— C. S. Lewis

From 2026, I am offering all of my writing here for free. I’m just not comfortable anymore charging for it, especially when it is on Christian themes.

However, as I still need to eat and feed my children, I am asking anyone who values what I do here, and who can afford it, to consider taking out a paid subscription. This allows me to continue my work, supports those who can’t afford to pay, and makes my writing accessible to all.

There are three tiers of membership here at the Abbey:

• READER. Anyone who wants to read my words here can do so with no payment required, starting in 2026.

• MEMBER. Take out a monthly or annual subscription, and you can comment and engage in conversation with the Abbey’s community. You also have access to paywalled content in the archives. Your subscription supports me and my work, and ensures that everyone can read it for free, whatever their means.

• FOUNDER. For the very generous or very able, a Founder Member’s subscription gets you all of the above. It also allows you to join in a live conversation with me and other Founders four times a year, and gets you a steep discount on my online writing course. You will also get priority access to any future events I run.

To find out more about me and my work, you can visit my website.

The illustrations on this website were produced by the artist Ewan Craig. You can find out more about him here.